Purpose The McMaster Monitoring My Mobility (MacM3) study aims to understand trajectories of mobility decline in later life using multi-sensor wearable technology. To our knowledge, MacM3 is the first major cohort to combine accelerometry and GPS to track real-world mobility in community-dwelling older adults.

Participants Between May 2022 and May 2024, MacM3 recruited 1,556 community-dwelling adults aged 65 and older (mean age 73.9 years, SD = 5.5) from Hamilton and Toronto, Ontario. Of the cohort, 66.2% were female, 62.4% married/partnered, 75.3% had post-secondary education, and 47.2% had ≥3 comorbidities. Most were Canadian-born (69.3%) and White/Caucasian (88.2%), with greater ethnocultural diversity observed at the Toronto site.

Findings to date At baseline, 56.7% of participants reported no mobility limitations, 15.9% had preclinical limitations, and 27.4% had minor mobility limitations. Additionally, 37.5% had a fall in the previous year. Mean gait speed for the total sample was 1.23 m/s, with a mean Timed Up and Go time of 9.4 seconds and a 5x sit-to-stand time of 13.0 seconds. Wearables data from compliant users (≥7 days, ≥1 hours/day) showed a mean of 13.6 hours of daily wear over 10.2 days. Step count data (n = 1008) revealed a mean of 8,437 steps per day (SD = 2,943), ranging from 5,073 steps in the lowest quartile to 12,303 steps in the highest.

Future plans Ongoing work aims to develop predictive models of mobility decline by integrating wearable, clinical, and environmental data. Pipeline enhancements will enable GPS/IMU fusion to explore mobility-environment interactions and support aging-in-place tools.

Marla Beauchamp holds a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Mobility, Aging and Chronic Disease (CRC-2020-00043) and an Early Researcher Award from the Government of Ontario.

This work was supported by major research program funding from the Labarge Centre for Mobility in Aging within the McMaster Institute for Research on Aging at McMaster University and by AGEWELL.

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The details of the IRB/oversight body that provided approval or exemption for the research described are given below:

The Hamilton Integrated Research Ethics Board (HiREB) of McMaster University gave ethical approval for this work (Project number: 13905).

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Access to MacM3 data is currently unavailable to other researchers. We are working on developing processes to make de-identified data available to qualified researchers for approved analyses, following the review and approval of a study proposal, data use agreement, and ethical approval. For more information, please contact the corresponding author at beaucm1mcmaster.ca.